Californians sharply divided along partisan lines about immigration raids, poll finds

California voters are sharply divided along partisan lines over the Trump administration’s immigration raids in Los Angeles and across the country this year, a new poll shows.

Just over half of registered voters in the state oppose federal efforts to reduce illegal immigration, and 61 percent oppose deporting anyone without legal status in the country. a recent survey It was published in The Times on Wednesday by UC Berkeley’s Probability Laboratory.

However, there is a significant difference in views based on political leanings.

Nearly 80 percent of Democrats oppose reducing the number of people entering the United States illegally, and 90 percent oppose deporting anyone undocumented in the country, according to the poll. 5 percent of Republicans oppose reducing arrivals, and 10 percent do not believe all undocumented immigrants should be forced to leave the country.

“The big thing we found, not surprisingly, is that Democrats and Republicans look really different,” said political scientist Amy Lerman, director of the UC Berkeley Probability Lab, which studies race, public opinion and political behavior. “From these perspectives, party lines align pretty clearly. While there are some differences within the parties on issues like age and race, the real big divide is between Democrats and Republicans.”

Lerman said the results largely reflect the state’s partisan divide, although there are some differences based on gender, age, income, geography and race.

One notable finding, Lerman said, was that nearly a quarter of survey respondents personally know or knew someone in their family or group of friends who was directly affected by the deportation effort.

“This is a really significant rate,” he said. “Similarly, we see people reporting that people in their communities are so concerned about deportation efforts that they do not send their children to school, shop at local stores, go to work, seek medical care, or attend church services.

The survey surveyed a sample of registered voters in the state and did not include the views of the communities most affected (unregistered voters, or those ineligible to vote because they are not citizens).

As of the end of October, just over 23 million of California’s 39.5 million residents were registered to vote, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

“So if we think about the California population overall, that’s a really significant underestimation of the impacts, even though we’re seeing really significant impacts on communities,” he said.

Earlier this year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a series of raids in Los Angeles and surrounding communities that escalated in June, sparking both fear and anger in Latino communities. The Trump administration also deployed the National Guard to the streets of the nation’s second-largest city to protect federal immigration officials, federal officials said, despite opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other elected Democrats.

The months since have been chaotic; Masked, armed agents randomly pull people, mostly Latinos, off the streets and from workplaces and send many of them to detention centers, where some die. Some of those deported were sent to El Salvador prison. Numerous lawsuits have been filed by government officials and civil rights groups.

In a notable local case, a federal district judge issued an order temporarily blocking federal agents from using racial profiling to conduct indiscriminate immigration arrests in the Los Angeles area. Supreme Court urgent appeal accepted and I have lifted that order while the case proceeds.

More than 7,100 undocumented immigrants have been arrested by federal authorities in the Los Angeles area since June 6, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

On Monday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), Bass and other elected officials hosted a congressional hearing on the impact of immigration raids taking place across the country. Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, also announced the creation of a tracking device to document abuse and abuse during ICE raids.

While Republican voters largely agreed with Trump’s deportation actions, 16 percent said they believed the deportations would worsen the state’s economy.

Lerman said the university plans to study whether those numbers change as the effects on the economy become more felt.

“If it continues to impact people, especially construction, agriculture and places that we really depend on economically because we’re seeing very high rates of impacts on the workforce,” he said. [on immigrant labor]“I can imagine some of this starting to change even among Republicans,” he said.

There are multiple indications that dissatisfaction with the president is growing among Latinos, whose support for Trump is rising in the 2024 election, according to separate national polls.

Nearly eight in 10 Latinos said Trump’s policies were harming their community, compared with 69% during his first term in 2019, according to a national survey of U.S. adults released Monday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. About 71% said the administration’s deportation efforts went too far; This rate increased compared to 56% in March. In its survey of Latino voters for the first time in the last two decades, Pew found that the number of Latino voters who say their situation in the United States has worsened has increased, with more than two-thirds expressing this opinion.

Another poll released earlier this month by Somos Votantes, a liberal group that urges Latino voters to support Democratic candidates, found that a third of Latino voters who previously supported Trump regretted their decision, according to a national survey.

Small business owner Brian Gavidia is among Latino voters who backed Trump in November because of financial troubles.

“I’m tired of fighting, I’m tired of seeing my friends close their businesses,” the 30-year-old actor said. “When [President] Biden ran again, I said, ‘I’m not going to vote for the four years we’ve just had… It saddened me and broke my heart that our economy was going down, and that’s why I went this route.”

The East Los Angeles native, the son of immigrants from Colombia and El Salvador, said he is not worried about Trump’s immigration policies because the president has promised to deport the “worst of the worst.”

He was disgusted as he watched the raids in Los Angeles earlier this year.

“They take fruit farmers and day laborers, is this the worst of the worst for you?” he remembered thinking.

Over a lunch of asada tortas and horchata in East Los Angeles, Gavidia explained that he was detained by Border Patrol agents in June while working at a towing yard in Montebello. Agents who said he was an American citizen pushed him against a metal door to find out which hospital he was born in, according to video of the incident.

After reviewing his identification, agents eventually let Gavidia go. The Department of Homeland Security later claimed that Gavidia was detained pending investigation of interference and released after verification that he was a U.S. citizen without an arrest warrant. He is currently named as a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups alleging racial profiling during immigration raids.

“I was the culprit in that moment, I was the worst of the worst in that moment, which is crazy because I went to see who they got – it was the worst of the worst they said they were going to get,” Gavidia said. “But when I got there I was the worst of the worst.”